March
20th, 2006
Like pretty
much everything you'll see here, this actually happened. As
the product of spectacularly poor parents myself, I want nothing
more than to be a good father to my three-year-old. At the same
time, even the most casual reader will have long
since identified me as a hopeless
geek. As such, I've been dying to show my daughter Star
Wars since the day she was born. Every day I debate whether
the undeniable coolness of a lightsaber
battle justifies me showing a preschooler the
smoking corpses of Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru.
Shirley
Temple seemed like the wiser choice. A female protagonist my
daughter could identify with. She sings, she dances, she…
oh shit.
Ok. Lesson
learned. Now let us never speak of it again.
Last Monday
we introduced words vs. pictures and promised that we'd make
it a regular feature if response was positive. We're now reneging
on that promise: considering our traffic, a few hundred votes
don't really constitute an overwhelming response, but we had
fun doing it so we're going to keep
doing it anyway. What the hell, right?
Last week's
question was “Would
you rather be famous now and forgotten after your death or obscure
while alive and revered 100 years after your death?”
and last week's answer was “48%
of respondents are clearly related to Jamie in some way.”
More interesting to me was the 9% who cared enough to read the
entire blog, visit the poll, and go through the voting process
just to call us morons. Nine per cent, I suspect, is the exact
percentage of respondents that constitutes my relatives. My
favourite comment was from the individual who said “Hookers
don't take worms for HJs, Graham.” I had to have that one
explained to me, as I first interpreted it to be an attack on
the size of my genitalia.
Join this
week's debate here.
-Graham
Graham is
not a racist. Just in case you got the wrong impression (as
suggested by several unsubscribe e-mails). Not to dumb it down,
but... the whole point of the comic is that you want
to shelter your children from the ignorance of racism.
I've had
a similar experience to Graham's Shirley Temple episode: My
son has a ravenous appetite for Tintin.
If you don't know about this series, it's a tale of adventures
featuring a 14 year old boy that travels around with abusive,
drunken old Captain Haddock (who is in no way related to him).
They were written in a different time. The 30's were a time
when it was OK to smoke in a children's book. Herge's ethnocentric
view and reliance on cultural stereotypes aside, they're fun
books. At times, though, my wife and I feel like those guys
who censor
military documents - black marking out anything we deem offensive.
"Daddy, you skipped a page!" Uh, no I didn't. Go to
sleep.
-Jamie
